Sunday, March 20, 2011

Dearscholar,

We noticed that you have published an article in the journal Crime media cultere, so we kindly invite you to submit an article to our journal "Cross-cultural Communication"(CCC), which is apeer-reviewed petroleum journalpublished quarterly by Academic Journals (http://www.cscanada.net; Http://www.cscanada.org). All the manuscripts are required to be written in English, and they should be submitted as attachment toccc@cscanada.orgor caooc@hotmail.com. The preferred formatfor the manuscript is APA, although theMSWord format is also acceptable.Note that the submission deadline for the first issue is May 20, 2011. Our objective is to inform author s of the decision on their manuscript(s) within four weeks. Instruction for authors and other details are available on our website:http://www.cscanada.net/index.php/ccc.

Ha ha. There is no journal Crime media cultere. A petroleum journal? Who wold pose APA and MSWord as contrasting members in the category of format?

But: what is the purpose? This isn't sophisticated enough to actually be doing a pay-journal scam, and the web page above isn't even in grammatical English. Cui bono? Hm... are they targeting foreign academics trying to break into English language publications?

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Away in Turkey while on maternity leave, every night before dropping off to sleep I'd read another half page. Yes, the Philip Roth book. It was really good. The opening parts of the book describe the appeal of fighting against corporate domination and for a world free of wage slavery. But a marriage is the centerpiece of the book, not communism, and it doesn't really matter whether communist Ira is fighting against unfair labor practices or whether he's active in some other up-hill social battle, because in the end, his quirky marriage to a film star both protected him initially from being blacklisted and later did him in. It's a powerful story.

Although H is a Roth fan (once had to get up in the night and to go a 24 hour bookstore to get the next Roth novel on his list), he wasn't happy with the book -- felt that Roth had only the most basic understanding of what communists were trying to do in mid-20th century American. "He doesn't really understand that era" H said (contrary to the book's back page blurbs).

But now H is like Ira -- he's married and drawn into the demands of married life, including the total absorption required to help me take care of two little boys, now almost one year old, who never take the cute off.

No comments allowed unfortunately because of spam; you can always email me.